[CTRL] Economics 101: Turning water into wine
-Caveat Lector- http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=521 Economics 101: Turning water into wine Printed on Wednesday, July 24, 2002 @ 00:40:00 EDT John Brand By John Brand, D.Min., J.D. YellowTimes.org Columnist (United States) (YellowTimes.org) - Dissection is not comprehension. In high school biology class we dissected frogs. All the parts were neatly laid out. There were the organs, the muscles, the skin, and the bones. However, knowing all that and having it neatly labeled did not help us to understand very much about the frog. We had no idea what constituted life for a frog from merely knowing its parts. We did not comprehend what is meant to be a frog. Parsing is not understanding. Parsing a sentence from Hamlet gives us no understanding of the tragedy of the Prince. We might know everything there is to know about the grammatical structure of a sentence and have absolutely no understanding of the character. We can know all the parts and still have no wisdom about the whole. This column seeks to comprehend and understand, not dissect, a significant area of American life. It deals with the nature of the stock market. I am certainly not a financial wizard. I lay no claim to owning an economic crystal ball. But I do know this: we can analyze a financial report until death do us part and never know the substance of the financial condition of the company. Where in the report does it show how expenses are hidden as long-term investments? Where does it show how many offshore companies are used to hide the true financial health of a company? I learned about the ways of the world of high finance in 1987 while on a trip to Grand Cayman. While there I attended a Rotary Meeting. After we were called to order, the Presiding Officer said something like this, George, I heard you argued with your wife last Tuesday. We don't tolerate that. That will be a $1,000 fine. George walked up to the platform and handed the Treasurer $1,000. Jim, the Chair continued, I don't like your tie. That will be a $500 fine. Jim smilingly handed over $500. As the meeting continued more and more members were cited for supposed misconducts and paid big dollar fines. It certainly does not take a genius to figure out that I tried to make myself invisible. Finally, the monetary bloodletting stopped and the regular meeting proceeded. After the meeting I asked a fellow Rotarian at my table, What in the world was that all about? He laughed and said, In 1786 (or some such date) a member of the British Royal Family was on a ship floundering on the rocks near the Island. Brave locals saved his life. In gratitude the King decreed that taxes should never be imposed upon Grand Cayman. Of course, we have to support our local government. So we have chosen this way to do it. We collect fines to support our schools, maintain our roads, pay for our local government. I must have had a puzzled look on my face, so he continued. You see this Club has members from all the big banks on the Islands. We know ahead of time who will be called upon to pay a 'fine' and the amount of the fine. Still not understanding what went on, the gentlemen continued, We can afford to do this because about $30,000,000 a week is deposited in our banks by people from the United States and Europe. Our banking laws are similar to the Swiss laws. There is total banking privacy. Now I understood. Corporations and individuals deposit money in Grand Cayman to escape paying taxes and to escape public disclosure. The amount may have been $30,000,000 every two weeks or whatever. But to an old country boy - and even to someone like Kenny Boy - it was a lot of money - whatever it was. Most folks I know do not have a bank account in Grand Cayman or in Switzerland. However, we may very well invest in companies that do. We can study their financial statements until we are blue in the face but we have no idea about their hidden assets or their hidden debts. We assume that honest and honorable accounting firms certify financial statements as being true. However, we have no ideas which accounting methods they use. We had no idea that Wendy Gramm (wife of Texas Senator Phil Gramm) as the lame-duck chair of the Commodities Future Trading Commission and one other Commissioner permitted Enron to exempt their energy future derivatives from Commission oversight. I wonder if Senator Gramm taught that neat trick to his economic students at Texas A M? Or did Mrs. Gramm think that one up all by herself? And so we dissect the financial statements and don't know beans about the company. So why are Americans duped into believing that the stock market is the way to fiscal security and to a safe and prosperous retirement? Why even the present President of the United States wanted workers to be enabled to invest a part of their Social Security funds in the stock market. There may have been a time when the stock market was a proper investment tool. But somewhere along the trail, corporate
[CTRL] Economics as superstitions, and economists as shamans.
-Caveat Lector- How the Economists Got It Wrong James K. Galbraith The American Economic Association (AEA) met January 7-9 in Boston, for a millennial program distinguished by its attention to international policy issues, most particularly financial crises (as in Asia) and the failure of the so-called "economic transition" (as in Russia). And yet, in this odd rush to relevance, something was curiously awry. Apart from a panel including former World Bank chief economist Joseph Stiglitz, the meetings featured almost no one with a record of criticizing the institutions that gave us the Asian crisis or the transition failure. Instead, they were dominated--in session after session--by the architects of the present world order, including Yeltsin advisers Andrei Shleifer and Anders Aslund, the International Monetary Fund's Stanley Fischer, and U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers. Even the arch-speculator Myron Scholes appeared. Never, perhaps, has such a luminous crowd gathered to discuss so disastrous a set of its own failings. Equally striking, from the larger intellectual standpoint, was the lack of retrospective in this year 2000 program of the AEA. The great issues of economic policy--inflation and unemployment, economic growth and stabilization, the government's budget, inequalities of income and wealth--were missing. The central themes of economic theory, including markets and market structure, competition and monopoly, efficiency and equity, and the business cycle, were to be found only in sessions devoted to narrowly defined applied cases. Reading through paper titles, one finds no mention of John Maynard Keynes, Adam Smith, or Karl Marx, or even of Paul Samuelson or Milton Friedman. Samuelson himself appeared once, to give a brilliant short lecture on "The Golden Virtue of Eclecticism"--but to the institutionalists rather than the mainstream. Missing Ideas So what is modern economics about? It seems to be, mainly, about itself: The AEA meets to celebrate the importance of its members, their presence in high public positions, their influence in foreign lands, and the winning of the Nobel Prize. Female and black members have won the right to organize sessions about gender and race--thus domesticating some of those who might otherwise complain. Radicals and Keynesians, on the other hand, appeared only on panels organized separately, by an alphabet soup of splinter associations. What was therefore most conspicuously missing from this meeting of America's premier social science organization, was any actual discussion of economic ideas. But what am I thinking? Of course they don't want to discuss ideas. Would you, with the record of this professorate? Consider what has happened, in recent years, to five of the leading ideas of modern economics. 1. Inflation is everywhere and always a monetary phenomenon. This dictum is the most famous single thought associated with Milton Friedman. It was once, briefly in the early 1980s, the driving philosophy of the Federal Reserve. Its architect, and many of his students, have won the Nobel Prize. But in practice, monetarism has been completely, silently abandoned. Measures of money (notably M2) have been growing rapidly for years, with no inflationary effect. Monetarism as such is, today, an academic dead letter. There wasn't one monetarist topic on the AEA's calendar this year, and a new academic monetarist hasn't emerged in decades. And yet, the signal policy achievement of the monetarist movement remains intact. Thirty years ago, Friedman-style monetarists wiped out all alternative theories of inflation. The ideas of "cost push" and "wage-price spirals," on which the successful anti-inflation strategies of the 1960s had been based, disappeared. To this day, there exist no alternatives for fighting inflation, except higher interest rates, recession, and unemployment. These are the hard measures, the brutal measures, for which we have the monetarists to thank. 2. Full employment without inflation is impossible. Four years ago, virtually all "serious" economists, including many self-described Keynesians, agreed: There existed a "natural rate of unemployment." This was in the vicinity of 6 percent, and below it inflation was certain to rise. The number, it turns out, had no basis in serious study; it was first made up by Robert J. Gordon as an illustration for his textbook. Since that time, unemployment has been continuously below 6 percent, without rising inflation. It is now almost exactly 4 percent, the formal target of the Full Employment Act. Faced with the embarrassing facts, only a handful of economists continue to defend the natural rate idea. And yet, the natural rate movement still influences policy. Some of its survivors vote on the Federal Reserve's Open Market Committee. They are presently driving interest rates upward on precisely the pretext that low unemployment must otherwise soon bring rising inflation. It is a notion for which no
[CTRL] Economics
-Caveat Lector- http://thunder.sonic.net/~doretk/ArchiveARCHIVE/MARK%20EVANS/EconomicFactSheet .html The "big five" prime banks of wall street, the owners of the "Class A" stock of the NewYork Federal Reserve Bank, are: Chase-Manhattan, Citibank, Guaranty Trust, Chemical/Manufacturers-Hannover, and Bankers' Trust. The Class A stock of the Federal Reserve has not been sold or traded on the open market since it was hermetically sealed from the public at the end of the summer of 1914. It is the exclusive property of Wall Street and European prime banks, whose major stockholders are the trans-Atlantic Ruling Class. This pattern holds true of Central Banks throughout the nations of the advanced capitalist sector. The Big Five have interlocking directorates with the "Seven Sisters," the Anglo-Dutch-American oil cartels: Exxon, BP (British Petroleum), Dutch-Royal Shell, Texaco, Mobil, Gulf, and Socal. Several of these trans-Atlantic money and commodity cartels financed Mussolini and Hitler and actively maintained their connections with the Reich throughout World War II. They were also all actively involved in Stalin's Russia by the beginning of the first Five Year Plan in 1928. None of this is really secret-anyone can discover the facts by doing a little research. Nor should it be considered a "conspiracy" (either by those who promote or deny the essential facts of the matter)-bankers and businessmen have been "trading with the enemy" for centuries. It is just one more example of "the wise investment policy" of cartels like J.P. Morgan and Co. and Standard Oil of New Jersey. THE SEAT OF FIRST WORLD FINANCE Capital is Basel, Switzerland, where the Central Banks of the Group of Seven (G-7) form the directorate of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS). The G-7 include Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Canada, the U.S., and Japan. The G-7 are called the "Hard Currency Countries" because their Central banks, corporations privately owned by the Prime Banks of these nations, have acquired most of the mined, milled, and ingotted gold of the world. Approximately 80 percent of this is in the vaults of Credit Suisse, under the Berghoff, the airport in Zurich. A somewhat larger formation, called the G-10, includes Belgium, Holland, and Sweden. THE U.S. HAS BECOME THE GREATEST debtor nation on earth because the Prime Banks of the other nations of the G-10 (especially Britain, Holland, and Japan) have purchased the U.S. government debt in the form of semi-annual and tax-exempt U.S. Treasury Securities through the operations of the Federal Open Market Committee, the Fed's window on Wall Street. Of these U.S. Treasury Securities, 95% have been floated since the end of World War II to finance the Cold War against the "Evil Empire." Now Communism has been deflated as an enemy; nativist fascist movements are being pumped up all around the globe and the aggregate Debt is approaching the net worth of all the real estate and movables on the planet. Now, also, the U.S. and Russia arejoining their military and space programs, the U.S. is becoming by degrees a full-blown totalitarian state, and the bankers are beginning to foreclose upon the bankrupted minions and dupes within their new global condominium. THE BANK FOR INTERNATIONAL Settlements (BIS), the "first Beast," founded in 1930, was the first entity to be called a "World Bank." Monetarist, gold-based, it functions as a clearinghouse for the balance of payments between nations. It operated throughout WW II as an interlocking directorate and a clearinghouse for joint Allied and Axis high finance. The World Bank/International Monetary Fund (IMF), the "Second Beast," was founded in 1946, after being drafted at Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, during the war in 1944. The IMF functions as the collection agency for the World Bank, much as the IRS functions as the collection agency for the Federal Reserve Bank. The Wall Street branch of the Federal Reserve is the "fiscal agent" for the IMF in the USA. The capital pool of the IMF consists of the Prime Banks of the First World, which interlock with the First World (G-7) military-industrial complexes and the oil conglomerates. THE IMF FUNCTIONS, under the aegis of the United Nations, as a Keynesian paper credit-mill, extending credit in the form of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs) to the Second and Third World debtor nations, requiring that they purchase specified amounts of the currency of the G-7 nations, imposing "austerity terms" upon their internal economies, and looting them by means of "repayment schedules" of their natural resources and minerals. These are channeled through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) to the multinational cartels, also headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. WITH THE IMPLEMENTATION of NAFTA and the Uruguay Round of GATT, the real wages of blue and white collar workers in the U.S. will be leveled in time to near parity with the Third World. The last "Superpower," the United States, is
[CTRL] Economics of Networks Internet Site
from: http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/site.html Click Here: A HREF="http://www.stern.nyu.edu/networks/site.html"Economics of Networks Internet Site/A - This is the Internet Site for the Economics of NETWORKS This server was created by Nicholas Economides [EMAIL PROTECTED] At this site, you will find a collection of information on economic issues of networks, such as the telephone and fax communications networks, the internet, financial exchange and credit card networks, as well as on "virtual networks," such as the virtual network of all Windows or all Mac computers. Ranked as one of the top 5 economics sites worldwide by The Economist magazine. NEWS ALERTS: Conference on "The Law and Economics of United States v. Microsoft" on May 5, 2000 at NYU Discussion on US v. MS on PBS TV with host Jim Goodale, Prof. Nicholas Economides, and Prof. Eleanor Fox, in streaming video Interview with John Irons of About.com on the judge's "findings of fact" in US v. MS, 11/9/99 [About.com] US v. MS: The Judge's Findings of Fact (11/5/99): Analysis and Reaction Is the Microsoft ruling a "great victory for American consumers?" "ATT" breakup for Microsoft doesn't compute, editorial in the Star-Ledger, 11/19/99 Recent quotes of mine on US v. MS in print and broadcast Interview with John Irons of About.com on US v. MS, 6/1/99 [About.com] [Econom ics of Networks] LATEST NEWS AND ANALYSIS ON UNITED STATES v. MICROSOFT, INCLUDING THE "FINDINGS OF FACT" AND THE "FINDINGS OF LAW" REMEDIES ASSESSMENT ON UNITED STATES v. MICROSOFT Dictionary of Terms in Network Economics Interview with John Irons of the Mining Company, 3/30/99 My Letter to the Wall Street Journal on Path Dependence Interview at Forbes Digital Tool on futures markets in telecommunications Topic / Link What is this Site about? Download research papers on networks, compatibility, and related issues or to read their abstracts on line Download research papers on financial networks and electronic trading or read their abstracts on line Read the survey "The Economics of Networks" on line Interactive bibliography on the economics of networks Clickable e-mail addresses of authors in the bibliography and of others in the networks and telecommunications field The October 1996 special issue of the International Journal of Industrial Organization on Network Economics Research Papers on Differentiated Products and Location Theory Search any document on this server for any word(s) Announcements Related Subjects: Airline Networks Antitrust Cable Credit Card Networks Economics Electricity Fi nance Railroads Telecommunications Legislation Other interesting servers Opera arias by Puccini sung by my wife, Janine Economides. Statistics (hits, number of users etc.) of the "Economics of Networks" site The Economics of Networks Site has been visited times. This site is best viewed using a Netscape browser, version 3.0 or higher, or M icrosoft's Internet Explorer 3.0 or higher. If you use Internet Explorer, you will be able to hear background sounds as you open various pages. Turn up the volume and be prepared to be surprised! Send me comments at: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Many thanks to Alan Eisner, Gary Fuchs, Mark Ginsburg, and Ajit Kambil for helping me create and maintain this server. Last updated: 1/25/2000. Copyright © 1995 - 2000, N. Economides. - Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, All My Relations. Omnia Bona Bonis, Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/"www.ctrl.org/A DECLARATION DISCLAIMER == CTRL is a discussion informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substancenot soap-boxingplease! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright fraudsis used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. Let us please be civil and as always, Caveat Lector. Archives Available at: http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/CTRL.html A HREF="http://home.ease.lsoft.com/archives/ctrl.html"Archives of [EMAIL PROTECTED]/A http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/ A HREF="http:[EMAIL PROTECTED]/"ctrl/A To subscribe to Conspiracy Theory Research List[CTRL] send email: SUBSCRIBE CTRL [to:] [EMAIL PROTECTED] To UNsubscribe to Conspiracy
